Here follows a collection of articles, books and videos that I find
interesting…

…Or not! Because I believe it’s also important to cover a spectrum of
literature wider than just someone’s own opinion. Many links refer to arguments
and counter-arguments: I don’t necessarily agree with everything listed here.
Nonetheless I believe it’s wiser to not automatically discard antagonistic
opinions. They can prove instrumental in further consolidating one’s argument.

Besides, I’ve spent a significant amount of time reading books which, with
hindsight, I now consider a waste of time. If sharing my opinions can help
people on the same page avoid wasting their own time, then for the better!

Social sciences and computing

This book has a surprising composition: while about a bit more than the first
half is an interesting discussion over freedom and ethic, the last part gets
lost in a US political rant. I think it’s safe to drop out once reaching there.

In particular, see this comparison around shared libraries and dynamic linking.
While I believe this used to be a valid case, much of it is severly invalidated
by functional operating systems like NixOS or GuixSD.

In http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ Acme (a mouse driven editor), sam and ed
(a commandline text editor!) are considered better alternatives than Emacs and
Vim. Very few people would agree to that. And here is a more interesting
question: what thought process can lead to such a position?

While some bits are interesting in terms of software engineering, it sometimes
displays signs of stubborn anti-GNU / pro-Unix behaviour. In particular, from
http://suckless.org/sucks/:

Documentation

Somewhen GNU tried to make the world a bit more miserable by inventing texinfo. The result is that in 2016 man pages are still used and the documentation of GNU tools requires you to run info $application. The info browser is awkward and unintuitive and the reason why noone gets further than finding ‘q’ to quit it.

[…]

The suckless way is to have a short usage and a descriptive manpage. The complete details are in the source.

I find it hard to defend man pages and source code against Info manuals.

Arch Linux is a flagship Unix distribution and as such a household of
Unix philosophy defenders. I believe much of the principles represent the sane
part of the Unix philosophy and make up for one of the best Unix distributions
out there.